Hey all, first of all I love you all for being here, this started as a small
side project and ballooned into a fun area to talk about pop music. Sadly, I
have to take the site down for a while while I rethink how I host. Currently,
this site is hosted on my own hardware, on my own network. Something that was
never an issue, I had some protections around it to keep it safe. I won’t go
into all details, but yesterday someone on another instance uploaded some
extremely vile child content that federated to several other instances. Ours was
not affected (luckily), but to be safe I purged everything from the last 24
hours.
Unfortuanately, this will be a growing trend, and Lemmy devs haven’t done much
to protect instance owners. If someone uploaded something like that to a
different instance that we subscribed to, technically I would also be hosting
that data. (Federation is cool, but it means we are all hosting it), which means
the feds could come and beat down my door for hosting it. In the short term, I’m
going to let this go out so others can see it, but I’m hoping it’ll be federated
for other users while I convert over. Step 1 is that I cannot host this locally,
I need to get it off my network and into the cloud. Steps 2, 3, 4, and on are
going to be adding protections so stuff can’t ever get in in the first place,
integrating tools, and probably working with the lemmy developers on ways to
prevent it in the first place. I don’t know how long we’ll be down, but
unfortunately someone else ruined it for all of us for a bit. I’ll do my best to
come back up soon while I shore up our ingest. -Your swiftie admin, Scrubbles
I get that the Lemmy devs are swamped with a lot of github issues, but how is this not one of, if not THE top priority for them right now? It’s mind blowing that instance admins don’t have the ability to disable the automatic caching of images from other remote instances.
If any shit show instance that ends up having CSAM can then cause an admin’s instance to inadvertently cache/host that same content, why the fuck would anyone be motivated to host an instance and deal with the liability?
Because people are blowing this way out of proportion. Users uploading illegal content is always part of hosting a platform and lawmakers realized this decades ago. Platform hosters legally cannot be held liable for the content of their users unless they have actual knowledge of specific instances of illegal content. This is both in the US (section 230 of the Communications Decency Act) and the EU (chapter II of the Digital Services Act, previously the eCommerce directive)
I get that the Lemmy devs are swamped with a lot of github issues, but how is this not one of, if not THE top priority for them right now? It’s mind blowing that instance admins don’t have the ability to disable the automatic caching of images from other remote instances.
If any shit show instance that ends up having CSAM can then cause an admin’s instance to inadvertently cache/host that same content, why the fuck would anyone be motivated to host an instance and deal with the liability?
This is probably going to switch priorities
Following the Unix philosophy, why aren’t any of us doing anything?
Because people are blowing this way out of proportion. Users uploading illegal content is always part of hosting a platform and lawmakers realized this decades ago. Platform hosters legally cannot be held liable for the content of their users unless they have actual knowledge of specific instances of illegal content. This is both in the US (section 230 of the Communications Decency Act) and the EU (chapter II of the Digital Services Act, previously the eCommerce directive)